Bring You up to Speed: The Plan

We had hope to start our home next year, but we were in a bad drought last summer. The drought was putting a lot of stress on our pine trees. This causes them to be vulnerable to the dreaded Southern Pine Bettle, which can reek havoc on a stand of pines. We lost about 5 trees to the beetles that were going to be used for our house. So we faced a decision, stay with our plan to start in a year and take a chance of losing more trees this summer or go ahead and start cutting over the winter. We decided to go ahead and get started now. I'm thankful we did, because it has been another dry spring and summer so far. There will be a lot of trees lost again this summer.
Starting now would mean that I would be getting started before I had a chance to go to school. This wouldn't really be a problem. I could start cutting over the winter, peel and store logs in the spring and go to school in late spring. That's what we did.
As I have mentioned I love to work with wood. Particularly Rustic and Country style furniture, so cutting and peeling logs would not be foreign to me. This would however, be on a scale that I have not yet attempted. I looked forward to the challenge.













To put it simply, our plan is something like this. Cut and peel our trees, and store them on a rack up off the ground. Attend a log home building school. Work on a few small projects over the summer (a play house for my kids). Practice, Practice, Practice!!! Finalize our building plans over the summer. Start work on the log shell on a temporary foundation this fall/winter. Hopefully we will be finished with the log shell before it gets to HOT next summer. If I can handle the log shell, then we will start putting money into this dream. Clearing land, foundation, well, building materials, and the list goes on.